At first, it wasn’t ‘fast food.’ It was ‘fast food service,’ as in Fountain and Fast Food Service (the name of a big trade mag in the fifties). Gradually, the word ‘service’ fell out of style (etymologically), and as early as 1954, you could find ‘fast food’ alone, as in Fountain and Fast Food. Seven years later, the mag’s execs took the gloves off and renamed it Fast Food.
But, as the saying goes, that was then.
This is now: Americans spend over $150 billion dollars on fast food a year—65% of the worldwide total. The top ten fast food chains have redefined ubiquity with over 80,000 locations in the United States and close to double that figure, globally. Carbonated soft drink advertising budgets are astronomical, and as their sales expand exponentially so does the American waistline.
We’ve supersized ourselves, and there’s no end in sight.
According to John Seabrook writing in The New Yorker, “By the nineteen-nineties, obesity reached epidemic proportions.” In some states three out of five adults are overweight. Our children are in even worse shape: Childhood obesity has tripled since 1980. Tripled. Diabetes is now the seventh leading cause of death in this country, and giant food conglomerates have silenced many of their critics simply by offering them high paying jobs.
“For consumers, the result is confusion, misinformation, and lack of protection against health claims that are unwarranted and at worst are false,” stated Marion Nestle, the preeminent authority on the politics of food. Indeed, she adds: “...food choices are political as well as personal.”
How exactly did we get here?
Ironically, some of the founding fathers of fast food—Fred Harvey, for one—would be ashamed.
I. The Food Chain
Hamburgers
With a respectful historical nod to the Big Three Fast Food Precursors—clams, oysters and corn on the cob—let’s begin with the mother of all fast food: the hamburger.
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In the 13th century, in the throes of the Mongol invasion of Rus’, the Russians dubbed this meal-on-wheels ‘tartar steak,’ ‘tartar’ being their name for their mounted invaders. (The term would be later be Frenchified to ‘steak tartare.’)
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Upton B. Sinclair, Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, B2-132-11 |
By the 19th century, the German take on steak tartare had crossed the Atlantic, where more inventive American street vendors began to greet immigrants with the Hamburg steak placed between two slices of bread—an idea that may have gone over well enough with German immigrants and other slobs, but not with ACTUAL AMERICANS, who, thanks in part to Upton Beall Sinclair’s 1906 graphic exposé of the meat packing industry, wouldn’t be caught dead eating ground meat. Not yet.
Hot Dogs
Sausages, a.k.a. frankfurters (as in Frankfurt, Germany) and wieners (‘wien’ being Wienese for Vienna), vended from pushcarts before Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, would go on to be sold at fairs and amusement parks across America. Charles Feltman cobbled together a cart with a charcoal stove that could boil sausages set in a kettle before he left the Fatherland for America, and in 1867, not knowing what kind of trend he was about to set, began selling hot sausages placed in a bun on the beach at Coney Island.
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| Members of the Exalted Order of Hot Dog Fanciers, Courtesy of the New York Public Library, www.nypl.org |
In 1916, a Feltman employee named Nathan Handwerker was rethinking the hot dog. (A term invented either in 1901 at the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants played baseball—Harry Magely Stevens, the director of catering, seems to have had a hand in the creation of the bun and possibly the introduction of mustard and sauerkraut—or five years later, when a 29-year-old Hearst newspaper chain sports cartoonist named T.A. “Tad” Dorgan, reacting to rumors that the meat came from dogs, drew a dachshund—a dog favored, supposedly by German butchers—inside a bun.)
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| Hot Dog Stand, Coney Island, Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, USZ62-55753 |
“Problems soon developed… with the recurrent rumors that hot dogs were unhealthy fare, filled with rotten ground meats and an array of chemicals. As business began to dwindle because of this scare, Handwerker hired a group of college students, dressed them as physicians complete with stethoscopes, and positioned them outside his stands during the lunch hours eating hot dogs. Soon the slanderous claims of poor quality were countered with rumors that all doctors from a local hospital were eating at Nathan’s, so therefore the food must be healthy.”
That wouldn’t be the last time that the medical profession would be employed (willingly or unwillingly) by the fast food purveyors in the hopes that appearance would triumph over reality—again.
Et. Al.
Pizza (“Pizze Cavere,” or hot cakes, in Neapolitan dialect) was peasant food, eaten with a knife and fork. The first pizzeria in the Land of the Free opened on Spring Street in New York City’s “Little Italy” neighborhood in 1895, but it was the American GIs who had been a part of the liberation of southern Italy, who insisted that restaurants add pizza (as well as meatballs and spaghetti) to their menus.
French fries are so named because of the French culinary technique of cutting potatoes (and other vegetables) into narrow strips. A notable example of the presence of French fries in early America is brought to us by Thomas Jefferson, whose French chef prepared potatoes “…in the French manner” for a White House dinner.
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| Thomas Jefferson Portrait by Sully, Courtesy of the New York Public Library, www.nypl.org |
Before the century’s end, round fries, or chips, were born. Just over two decades later, in 1921, Earl Wise Sr., a Pennsylvanian grocer, used overstock and his mother's recipe to prepare the first batch of Wise potato chips.
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| Soda Fountain Counter in Drug Store, Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, D417-404 |
Washington ate it and so did Hamilton and Jefferson (although never together).
By 1850, Sarah Hale’s ‘Godey’s Lady’s Book’ (see THANKSGIVING) was suggesting that, “A party without it, would be like breakfast without bread or dinner without a roast.” A quarter of a century later, the ice cream soda made its debut in Philadelphia, and in the 1890s, carbonated water (soda water) was not served on Sundays so some fancy toppings were concocted, and the idea of the Sunday, or sundae (the “ae” was an affectation), was here to stay.
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| Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Ferris Wheel from the Gardens of the French Pavilion, Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, USZ62-104910 |
That same year a pharmacist’s assistant came up with the banana split, and fifteen years after that, an Iowa school teacher and sometime candy store owner made the most important discovery since fire: CHOCOLATE WILL STICK TO ICE CREAM. He named the result the “I-Scream-Bar,” which his partner, Russell Stover, soon changed to “Eskimo Pie.”
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| Grand Basin and Festival Hall Illuminated, Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, USZ62-59644 |
Speaking of sticks, in nearby Ohio, an ice cream parlor proprietor, experimenting with a new kind of ice cream bar, decided to counter his daughter’s criticism that it was “too messy” by putting it on a stick. By 1923, he was selling them from a truck complete with bells that signaled the “Good Humor” man was in town. (Eleven years after that, a test car driver named Tom Carvel began selling soft ice cream from a machine he invented.)
Sadly, we know don’t know much about the first malted, milkshake, ice cream sandwich, root beer float or frappe. What we do know is that Robert Green’s will stipulated that he was the originator of the ice cream soda and that egg creams never contained eggs or cream.
II. The Food Chains
Harvey House
Food itself was, obviously, a key element in the evolution of fast food America. But, where you ate played an even more important role in the process. To chart that course, let’s begin with Fred Harvey, a Brit, who came to America in 1850. A mere lad of fifteen, he landed a job off the boat as a dishwasher that paid two-dollars a week. (“Lord knows, [you pay] some dues gettin’ through.”) It took him six years to throw in the towel, turn his back on Manhattan and head down to New Orleans, where he reckoned he’d strike out on his own.
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| American Progress, John Gast, http://en.wikipedia.org |
Within a year, he opened a café, married, fell into debt (on account of the café), contracted typhoid, recovered from typhoid and set off for St. Louis, where he wouldn’t stay long.
You see it was in St. Louis that Fred heard stories about the West, and anyone who heard about the West—its land, its gold and the opportunities it held—had no choice but to go.
You see it was in St. Louis that Fred heard stories about the West, and anyone who heard about the West—its land, its gold and the opportunities it held—had no choice but to go.
“For West,” as Robert Penn Warren observes, “is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.”
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| Fred Harvey, http://en.wikipedia.org |
But, the West wasn’t the one-size-fits-all, easy-to-assemble, Horatio-Alger-from-rags-to-riches American Dream quick-fix miracle (see ACID TEST) that Fred and so many others sought.
His lot scarcely changed. He took on odd jobs and worked as a mail clerk for a spell, until in 1876, he became freight manager.
By then, he had settled down in Leavenworth, Kansas with his four (surviving) children. All the while, he continued to travel the rails, as much a muse for him as for Woody Guthrie.
By then, he had settled down in Leavenworth, Kansas with his four (surviving) children. All the while, he continued to travel the rails, as much a muse for him as for Woody Guthrie.
Appalled by the poor quality of food available to travelers, he thought more about health and wellness, came up with the idea that launched the first high-quality restaurant chain, approached the fledgling Atchinson-Topeka-Santa Fe line and shook on the deal.
Founded in 1877, his Western eateries served Atchison-Topeka-Santa Fe passengers and blazed the path for the not-so-high-quality chains that would follow.
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Harvey House, Santa Fe Station, Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, USZ62-118086 |
Harvey’s forty-seven Harvey Houses, staffed by comely, clean, intelligent and justifiably famous Harvey Girls, were immaculate. The girls lived in supervised dorms (with a 10 p.m. curfew) paid for by Fred Harvey, along with their travel expenses. (According to Film Critic Leonard Maltin in his review of the 1946 Judy Garland movie: “Westward expansion brings with it Fred Harvey’s railroad station restaurants, and proper young waitresses who have a civilizing influence on rowdy communities.”)
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| Twenty El Tovar Harvey Girls in Evening Uniform, c1926, http://www.flickr.com |
Horn & Hardart
In 1888, Horn, a twenty-seven-year-old born into a food family (two of his brothers ran restaurants), opened a quick service lunchroom in Philadelphia with his mother’s financial support and posted an ad for a partner with a restaurant background.
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| Stained Glass Horn & Hardart Facade, Courtesy of the New York Public Library, www.nypl.org |
Hardart, a thirty-eight-year-old waiter in another lunchroom (who had worked in and around restaurants for twenty-five years and counting), wrote I’m your man on a torn bag that he found and mailed it.
He was.
The two formed a partnership, discovered the new German technology for a waiter-less restaurant and in 1901 opened the first Horn & Hardart Automat on Chestnut Street in Center City Philly.
“The horseless carriage, the wireless telephone and the playerless piano have been surpassed…. Artistically it is a glittering, though effective, combination of plate glass, marble tiling, weathered oak wainscoting and hammered brass trimmings. Practically, it is a boon to thousands of hungry business men and women,” according to The Evening Bulletin.
That was only the beginning: In 1912, five more Horn & Hardarts opened—four in the City of Brotherly Love, one on Broadway in Times Square. By 1933, there were forty-three in New York City. (Ventures to Boston and Chicago failed for a variety of reasons.)
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| 1165 Sixth Ave., Courtesy of the New York Public Library, www.nypl.org |
Urban and urbane, Horn & Hardart Automats took the self-service cafeteria concept and ran with it. They were not only efficient and inexpensive; they were an art deco feast for the eyes. 6” x 8” stainless, glass window compartments that looked like letterboxes in a Ridley Scott post office covered one wall, and if “What you see is what you get” wasn’t their credo, it could have been.
Customers could see their sandwiches; salads; hot or cold dishes; desserts; and drinks, which included booze and piping hot coffee, spouting from dolphin-shaped, well, spouts. (Not-so-dumb-waiters delivered hot foods from the unseen kitchen, below. You couldn’t see it all yet.) The simple instructions were posted:
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| 977 Eigth Ave., Courtesy of the New York Public Library, www.nypl.org |
The customer need only lift the glass and remove the dish.
(“The failure of the automatic restaurants appeared to stem from a number of causes: instructions too complicated for the average customer, unappetizing microwave-heated food, speed no better than that of a conventional fast-food outlet, and prices no lower than conventional competitors. By the late sixties, the automatic restaurants had been largely forgotten....”)
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| 163-5 East 86 St., Alterations Completed, 1936, Courtesy of the New York Public Library, www.nypl.org |
White Castle
At around the time that Horn & Hardart was opening in Times Square, Walter Anderson was having his way with a meatball....
Anderson, a short-order cook in Wichita, Kansas, made the leap from meatballs to flattened, ground meat. Lore has it that Walter, who had “had it up to here” with meatballs—they were just taking too long—vented his frustration by smashing one of them, half-cooked, onto the grill.
Fact has it that “…a flattened patty smothered with onions, seared on both sides and served on a bun instead of bread slices…” was soon a hit at the diner, where Anderson worked. From then on (and in all likelihood, before then), Walter “experimented with grilling…in a variety of ways, molding the meat into different shapes and serving it with an assortment of condiments.” In 1916, he opened his own joint, a “remodeled” shoe repair store.
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| Broad Street in Wichita, Kansas, 1874, Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, USZ62-87441 |
“The hamburger finally became popular in the 1920s because of the intensive marketing campaign by an upstart restaurant chain in Wichita, Kansas.” So popular that, in 1937, The American Restaurant Association proclaimed the hamburger and apple pie America’s favorite foods.
Standardization became the rule of the day. Each White Castle looked like, you guessed it, a white castle, ushering in the early years of branded architecture.
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White Castle 616 Washington Ave, Southeast, Minneapolis, Minnesota, |
A brochure boasted that: “When you sit in a White Castle remember that you are one of several thousands; you are sitting on the same kind of stool; you are being served on the same kind of counter; the coffee you drink is made in accordance with a certain formula; the hamburger you eat is prepared in exactly the same way over a gas flame of the same intensity; the cup you drink from is identical with thousands of cups that thousands of other people are using at the same moment…”
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| A Woman in Front of a Levittown House, http://www.flickr.com |
(Which, at least, made Zooey Glass happy. After an announcer for “It’s a Wise Child” brought up housing developments, “....the little Burke girl said she hated houses that all look alike—meaning a long row of identical ‘development’ houses. Zooey said they were ‘nice.’ He said it would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody goodbye in the morning thinking they were your own family. He said he even wished everybody in the world looked exactly alike. He said you’d keep thinking everybody you met was your wife or your mother or father, and people would always be throwing their arms around each other wherever they went, and it would look ‘very nice.’”)
The all-male (until WWII) staff, most between eighteen and twenty-four, had to pass a rigorous physical and follow a strict dress code: black ties paired with adjustable paper hats and white shirts to promote the idea of cleanliness and sterility, and, therefore safety (see below). Jewelry, gum, bad breath and BO were forbidden.
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| Three Laughing Men by the Tiger Stream, Song Dynasty Painting Illustrating the Theme Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism Are One, http://en.wikipedia.org |
Carryout was the order of the day. Staying was discouraged, but the service was, nevertheless, polite. “Buy ‘em by the sack” was the advice printed on White Castle bags, and since “’em’” cost only five cents, all too many heeded it.
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| 12th Century Byzantine Manuscript of the Hippocratic, Oath, Rendered in the Form of a Cross, http://en.wikipedia.org |
By that time, thanks to Walt and Bill’s sliders and Walt’s bun, the hamburger had become the quintessential American meal. In 2011, over fourteen billion hamburgers will be consumed—twice the number of hot dogs.
Last but certainly not leased (in 1935, he invented food franchising when the post 1929 stock market crash, lending challenged banks turned him down) is Howard Johnson. His ice cream stands on Boston’s beaches and circa 1925, Quincy soda fountain served his own thick, rich chocolate syrup and three flavors his mother’s hand cranked ice cream (whose recipe called for pure, natural vanilla flavoring (rather than the cheap synthetic kind everyone else was using) with the resultant double-your pleasure butter fat content—the beginnings of premium ice cream.
Johnson added hot dogs, which he insisted be called the more formal ‘frankforts,’ cooked in butter and placed in a butter grilled roll (all cradled in a convenient cardboard holder), some fried clam rolls and expanded to twenty-eight flavors of ice cream, all made in his own factory, which varied seasonally and regionally.
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Howard Johnson's (precise location unknown), http://www.flickr.com |
Johnson's restaurants were (by 1940, there were 130) invariably topped by orange roofs that reflected light (when Johnson discovered that asphalt shingles were dull, he replaced them with enamel-coated metal ones), so that they could be seen from the turnpikes they were always located on or near, a weather vane and storybook characters – Simple Simon and the Pieman, signaling ‘kid friendly’ environs eons before the term became over-used ad infinitum.
“Howard Johnson strove for symmetry, and although perfect symmetry could rarely be attained, the company consistently achieved the next best thing, a serene balance between left and right. In some Johnson’s restaurants in the 1930s, there were exactly the same number of windows to the left of the front door as to the right, and they were almost evenly matched in size, even though strictly functional considerations would have dictated otherwise.”
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| Raymond "Ray" Kroc, http://en.wikipedia.org |
‘Symmetry.’ ‘Serene.’ ‘Sameness’ spelled differently.
Of course, the story of fast food in American could not be complete without briefly mentioning J.G. Kirby and David Wallerstein. Kirby was the Dallas boy, who pretty much invented the drive-in, and left us with this insight: “People with cars are so lazy they don’t want to get out of them to eat.” Wallerstein was working for a chain of movie theaters in Texas (clearly, a state where creativity abounds) when he invented the bucket of popcorn. He eventually convinced the frighteningly named Ray Kroc that supersizing was the future, and indeed, it was.
Bibliography
Barach, Arnold B.; Famous American Trademarks
Dickson, Paul; The Great American Ice Cream Book
Dylan, Bob; Lyrics 1962–2001
Gill, Jonathan; Harlem
Grimes, William; Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York
Hogan, David Gerard; Selling ‘em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food
Jakle, John A. and Keith A. Sculle; Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants and the Automobile Age
Levenstein, Harvey; Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America
—————; Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet
Librairie Larousse; Gastronomique Larousse; The World’s Greatest Culinary Encyclopedia
Love, John F.; McDonald’s Behind the Arches
Maltin, Leonard; Leonard Maltin’s 2007 Movie Guide
Mariani, John; America Eats Out: An Illustrated History of Restaurants, Taverns, Coffee Shops, Speakeasies, and Other Establishments That Have Fed Us for 350 Years
—————; The Dictionary of American Food and Drink
Nestle, Marion; Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health
PBS, “Fast Food (1954),” pbs.org/speak/words/trackthatword
Poling-Kempes, Lesley; The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West
Root, Waverly and Richard de Rochemont; Eating in America: A History
Salinger, J. D.; Raise High the Room Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Seabrook, John; “Snacks for a Fat Planet,” Dept. of Food Science, The New Yorker, May 16, 2011, 54-72
Smith, Andrew F.; The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, vols. 1 and 2
Warren, Robert Penn; All the King’s Men
Wikipedia; French Fries
Workman, Daniel; “Top Fast Food Countries: American Companies & Consumers Lead World in Outside Casual Dining,” suite 101, August 29, 2007, http://www.suite101.com/content/top-fast-food-countries-a29881.
Ziegelman, Jane; 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement
“By the nineteen-nineties….”; Seabrook, 54-72
“For consumers,....”; Nestle, 224
“…food choices…”; Ibid
“Problems soon…”; Hogan, 17
“Pizze Cavere….”; Grimes, 128
“…in the French…”; Wikipedia, 1
“…turned a…”; Schlosser, 139
“A Party Without…”; Root, 427
“Lord knows,....”; Dylan, 331
“For West,…”; Warren, 376-77
“A conductor…”; Poling-Kempes, 41
“Westward expansion…”; Maltin, 561
“The horseless….”; Langdon, 16
“The Automat….”; Grimes, 191
“Insert coin…”; Grimes, 187
“The failure….”; Landgon, 104
“…a flattened…”; Hogan, 25
“…experimented with…”; Hogan, 25
“…to break down…”; Hogan, 30
“The hamburger…”; Smith, 587
“When you sit…”; Mariani, Vol. 1, 124
“…the little…” Salinger, 68
“…arranged for…”; Hogan, 33
“Howard Johnson….”; Langdon, 49
“People with….”; Langdon, 59
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